California state legislature approves Location Privacy Act

It would prevent police from tracking a suspect's location without a warrant.

California's state legislature passed the Location Privacy Act of 2012 (SB-1434) on Wednesday, which would make it mandatory for law enforcement agencies to obtain a warrant before gathering any GPS or other location-tracking data that a suspect's cell phone might be sending back to its carrier.

The act, sponsored by State Senator Mark Leno (D-San Francisco), and co-sponsored by the ACLU of California and the EFF, passed with strong support by both parties. It now needs to be signed by California's governor to be put into law. But the bill isn't necessarily a straight-shot to penal code glory: the EFF points out that Governor Jerry Brown vetoed California's last attempt at enforcing stricter privacy rules in 2011, when he killed a bill that would have prevented police from searching the phones of apprehended suspects without a warrant.

Earlier this year, the ACLU requested documents from 380 law enforcement agencies nationwide, and found that responses from over 200 local law enforcement agencies showed "that while cell phone tracking is routine, few agencies consistently obtain warrants. Importantly, however, some agencies do obtain warrants, showing that law enforcement agencies can protect Americans' privacy while also meeting law enforcement needs."

Last week the subject of warrantless GPS tracking came up again in the national news, when a federal appeals court ruled that law enforcement is allowed to track the GPS signal coming from a suspect's prepaid phone without a warrant. Privacy advocates questioned the constitutionality of that ruling, which seems to open the door to a world where cellphones can reveal much more information to the wrong people than their users would ever have expected.

"powers not delegated to the 'United States' by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States"

-the States prohibits warrantless surveillance-powers not delegated by Constitution (read: explicitly) to the Feds-the Feds are open to lawsuit for violating Constitution

Probably would never happen. The Supreme Court was even considering that they should cease referring to the States as sovereign, in not being capable of creating their own laws without federal laws trumping them.

Warrants involve a lot of writing, catching the duty judge for the district in a good mood, and, well, often by the time you've got one in hand you're already behind the curve. For a while you could get away with a "verbal exception" from the duty judge but those have become less and less acceptable and, well, they require a written warrant that has at least one piece of the puzzle correct.

Fortunately you can categorize most people as terrorists. (This is a joke.)

This is great, next step, getting people to stop broadcasting their location constantly of their own volition.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I do not think that this is possible. If I remember correctly, there are three ways phones do geolocation: the first, is having the receiver in the phone itself to calculate position, the second is to have the receiver in some server provided by the user's location based service, like the Verizon, ATT, Google, Apple, etc, and the third way is the server that law enforcement has access to for emergency purposes. When you turn off your GPS, I think you are only turning off the receivers in the first two options, but not the third.

This is great, next step, getting people to stop broadcasting their location constantly of their own volition.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I do not think that this is possible. If I remember correctly, there are three ways phones do geolocation: the first, is having the receiver in the phone itself to calculate position, the second is to have the receiver in some server provided by the user's location based service, like the Verizon, ATT, Google, Apple, etc, and the third way is the server that law enforcement has access to for emergency purposes. When you turn off your GPS, I think you are only turning off the receivers in the first two options, but not the third.

Your phone can't be a passive device and still receive calls; it needs to regularly ping the nearest towers so the cell network knows how to route incoming calls. Asking "what towers is this phone in range of" is good enough to calculate your position within 100m or less.

Your phone can't be a passive device and still receive calls; it needs to regularly ping the nearest towers so the cell network knows how to route incoming calls. Asking "what towers is this phone in range of" is good enough to calculate your position within 100m or less.

I used to use Google maps on the my Blackberry sans GPS. It works very well without GPS in the city with lots of cell towers. Less well if you are out in the county, though, where your position could be 1000 or even 3000 meters off.

They don't. Devices have to communicate with each other during information exchange which in turn makes them not passive.

Binary Alchemy wrote:

Your phone can't be a passive device and still receive calls; it needs to regularly ping the nearest towers so the cell network knows how to route incoming calls. Asking "what towers is this phone in range of" is good enough to calculate your position within 100m or less.

Your phone can be passive if you aren't worrying about anything "incoming".

Turn your phone off except when you need to use it - outbound communicaitons.

But if you are expecting ioncoming communication then no.

NicoleC wrote:

I used to use Google maps on the my Blackberry sans GPS. It works very well without GPS in the city with lots of cell towers. Less well if you are out in the county, though, where your position could be 1000 or even 3000 meters off.

Even this will pass data back to the cell towers. How do you think you are pulling that map information from Gogole Maps ? It goes thru your Service Provider and your cellular plan.

I'm seriously shocked and impressed that this is coming out of California. I'm glad that someone is starting to show a smidgeon of intelligence and concern for its citizens' privacy. The way I see it is if a warrant works for searching a home (or sometimes a vehicle) without it crippling the authorities, then the same should apply to cell phones; and hopefully in the future, other forms of digital location devices. As soon as we start saying that warrants are too cumbersome for some forms of searches or locations, then it only opens the doorway for all warrants to be scrapped in time. This simply will no do.